Exploring the Representation of the Taliban in Pakistani and American English Newspapers through Corpus Approaches

Abstract

The present study investigated the representation of the Taliban in Pakistani and American English newspapers by exploring the collocations, collocation networks, and concordance. The study used mixed-methods approach. The data were collected from two Pakistani English Newspapers, the DAWN and the News International, and two American English Newspapers, USA Today and the New York Times. A corpus comprising 136,721 tokens was compiled from the news articles section of the selected newspapers. The data were analysed by using LancsBox 6.0 and AntConc-4. LancsBox was used for analysing the collocation and collocation networks of the Taliban, and AntConc for exploiting the concordance of the Taliban. Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional model was used to interpret the results provided by the software. The study found that Pakistani English Newspapers use positive words, such as brave, expert, and powerful, as collocates with the Taliban. On the contrary, American English Newspapers use negative words, such as brutal, bloody, and terrorists, as collocate with the Taliban. The study concluded that Pakistani English newspapers positively represent the Taliban and American English newspapers negatively represent the Taliban.